Political caricatures have been around forever and they’re valuable commentary. But racist ones are not ok.
by digby
I wrote about this hideous thing over at Salon yesterday:
That’s supposed to be Maxine Waters, the Democratic congresswoman from Watts. Now, the art itself is obviously derivative of the great guerrilla artist Robbie Conal, known for his gnarly street post depictions of politicians…
Starting in the 1980s these posters appeared on buildings and electric poles in California and elsewhere and became an iconic style of political commentary through art. This Maxine Waters poster artist clearly aspires to be a Conal knockoff and the work itself is competent, if also obvious. Indeed, if this artist could have restrained himself and taken a more subtle approach it could have been a political comment in itself. Taking the liberal iconography of Robbie Conal and using it for conservative purposes is a clever idea. But as with virtually all of right-wing culture, subtlety is not in their vocabulary so they had to go over-the-top with the obnoxious racist “poverty pimp” title and the even more racist commentary underlying the portrait.
Read on for a deeper deconstruction of the image and why it’s different than those Conal images of Reagan and Bush.
It’s just … ugh.